My Zen Arcade

So I’m feeling all sciencey these days and just picked up ‘The Canon’
by Natalie Angier. It has a great little example in there that really
defines science and, inadvertently, why ‘intelligent design’ isn’t a
science AND why no one really thinks it is, even those who support the
idea.
My DVD player stops working the day I get my favorite movie. I’d been
looking forward to watching it for weeks. Anyhow, I start trying to
figure out what the problem is. I check the TV, that’s fine. I check
the cables, those are fine. I keep generating hypothesis and then
gather data to support or disprove my theories. Nothing is working.
I’m starting to get very sad. Its looking like my whole day is
ruined.
So I go online and find some more advice. Someone explains that
there’s a switch in back of the DVD player that, if in the wrong
position, results in exactly the symptoms my hardware is experiencing.
I run back to the living room all excited. I flip the switch. Just
before turning everything back on, I think “God, please let this work”
and lo and behold, it does!!
Now, I can’t actually PROVE WITHOUT ANY DOUBT that it was the switch,
I can’t PROVE WITHOUT ANY DOUBT that it wasn’t my little prayer and
God doing it, but I can tell you one thing. The next time it happens,
I’ll be checking that switch. I don’t fully understand the workings of
a DVD player, so I’m not completely positive why the switch worked,
but it pretty obviously did, and most likely will again. I can even
flip the switch back and forth to reproduce the problem. In short, I
have, say, 90% of the answer, even though it is virtually impossible
for me to prove causation. What I won’t be doing, and neither will
any of you, is praying first and expecting that to fix things.
And if you aren’t praying first, then you understand why ID isn’t
science. Even if you won’t admit it.

You might say that its easy enough to explain a DVD player. But talk
to a computer geek sometime. You’d be surprised how often we resolve
a technical problem without being completely sure how we did it, or
why the problem occurred in the first place. But we ALL know that
there’s some technical reason for it, we just can’t see it. We might
make jokes, but we know that it isn’t gremlins or the computer being
‘bad’ per se. We know that there was something minuscule happening on
the drive, or the motherboard, or a strange series of events causing a
variable to be set wrong. We can’t see it, we’ll probably never know
the actual answer unless we can physically reproduce the event, but we
KNOW that there’s an actual, technical cause. And, given enough time,
it’ll happen again. The fact that I can’t explain it right now
doesn’t mean anything.
If you understand this, you understand why ID isn’t a science. Even
if you won’t admit it.